I’ve not been using my GPS watch recently, but the club run this
evening was estimated as 4½ to 5 miles. The faster pace, and
the two hills (or rather, one hill and two halfs), were a struggle for
me. But that’s exactly what I wanted — a struggle.
It’s not a new or original observation. In fact, it’s something of a
cliché. Someone on the forum referred to it yesterday as
that No Pain, No Gain Malarkey.
The simple truth is that no run is useless. Even those juddering ambles
round-the-block get my heart pumping and burn off a few hundred
calories. Just as important, they give me time to pick over the day
that’s gone, and allow me to think of a few good excuses for the day
ahead. It’s why I don’t like the trendy term “junk miles”. Maybe they
don’t further the training cause in a specific way, but they are
life-enhancing and keep us ticking over.
One of the differences between these easy runs and the other sort —
the ones that fight back — is that we’re more likely to appreciate the
easy ones as they occur. They happen in real time, and give us a chance
to enjoy the sight of the rabbits and the deer, the smell of woodsmoke
on the evening breeze, the tranquility of the towpath. The tough,
sweaty, painful runs — wrestling matches between your training plan
and your spirit — are to be treasured only in retrospect. How I hate
them while they happen. How much I want to make them stop. But remember
those strict teachers at school? I can think of one or two who made my
life a misery, and I theirs, yet the passage of time eventually
revealed them to be the best. It’s the one and only way of working
through the hard ones. You try to project yourself forward to a point
where it’s all over. And particularly post-shower, in fresh, warm
clothes, when you sit in silence, vibrating with something I can only
compare to a post-coital sensation.
I don’t want to exaggerate the toughness of the run. It wasn’t a 10
mile slog up a rocky hillside in the dark, through a hailstorm. It was
a sprightly jog on the pavements of suburban Reading, but a sprightly
jog for 45 minutes, including hills, is more than I do when I’m on my
own. I felt it, I hated it, but I benefitted from it.
Pain and gain.
